


stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead

by thedivinemove



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Antichrist, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Murder, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Rough Sex, Time Travel, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-31 07:13:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21110405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedivinemove/pseuds/thedivinemove
Summary: It keeps happening. They live an endless circle, even as time moves forward. She kills him, he comes back. The story repeats itself, more or less the same. They’re a snake eating its tail, a pentagram with no beginning or end.Or: Mallory keeps reliving her nightmares. Michael gets killed. Repeatedly. [post-season]





	stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead

“Hello there. I’m looking for a… Mallory? A friend of yours perhaps?”

That _voice_. It turns Mallory’s blood to ice. The glass of water she’s been holding slips from her hands and shatters on the floor.

“Who are you?” she hears Zoe ask, not letting him step foot inside, keeping him firmly at the threshold of the Academy.

He can’t be here.

This can’t be real.

Mallory rushes to the door.

“Ah, there you are,” Langdon says, lips curving in a sharp smile. He looks young, the very picture of the boy she ran over three months ago – except maybe his hair is shorter, combed back, and his clothes are more refined, more fitting a snobbish college student than a teenager. The way he holds himself though, with lazy confidence and a promise of barely held-back power – that’s all the Langdon of her nightmares.

She forces herself to smile apologetically at Zoe and pushes past her. “It’s okay, I’ll take it from here,” she tells her with all the resolve she can manage and steps in front of Langdon, barring his way inside.

Langdon looks over her shoulder – her height making it laughably easy – and makes a show of inspecting the school. “Are you all here?” he asks conversationally, and Mallory shivers at the memories his words bring – the sound of shots being fired, the screams— “Is maybe… your _Miss_ _Supreme_ present?”

She grabs his arm then, fingers digging into the fabric of his jacket with no care for gentleness. “Your business is with me, not them. Leave them alone.”

“Sooner or later my business will be with all of you, there’s no doubt about it.” He looks down at her. “But I suppose first thing’s first.”

They step into the street, and another memory flashes through Mallory’s mind. It’s still fresh, like an open wound, and one she revisits almost every night when she falls asleep. Pressing the gas pedal. Again. And again. Hitting the boy. Again. And again.

“You died,” she says.

Devilry dances in his pale blue eyes. “Yeah, well, it didn’t stick,” he tells her with a sneer. “Never would have taken you for a type who would murder an innocent child in cold blood, though. I’m impressed.”

“I had no choice,” she says automatically, then stops herself. “And it was the Antichrist. I can’t imagine anyone further from an innocent child than _that_.”

She leads him down the street, away from the Academy. It’s not the smartest of choices – it’s a busy neighborhood, and there are children playing on the sidewalk, men mowing lawns, women sunbathing or chattering over the hedges. Normal families. Deserving to never, ever breathe the same air as the Antichrist. She has to do something. And quickly.

“So how come it didn’t stick?” She looks up at him, and attempts a smile. “I tried _so_ hard.”

Langdon bristles. “I followed you, of course. The tub was big enough for both of us. What,” he asks at her bewildered expression, “you thought you’re the only one who can hocus pocus their way back?” He scoffs. “Remember who my father is?”

Despite the cold creeping up her spine, she rolls her eyes. “Hard to forget.”

“And I’m obviously here to kill you.”

“Obviously.”

“What I didn’t expect was—” he gestures at himself, from head to his torso to his shiny lacquered shoes, “—this”

“The 2015 fashion?”

Langdon grits his teeth. He turns on his heel, and steps into her personal space. Her nose fills with his scent.

“We were thrown back into our old bodies,” he explains, every word drawn out as if talking to child. “With our old abilities. And old power.”

She doesn’t know how she stops herself from turning back and running away, the way every cell of her being is begging her to.

“It took me almost three whole months to heal myself after what you’ve done to me.” His breath brushes her cheek. “As you can imagine, I’m not very happy about that.”

“So you’re no longer the all-powerful Antichrist,” she quips, despite the warning bells ringing in her head, “how sad.”

He grabs her arms then and nearly lifts her off her feet. She winces in pain. “Don’t think it helps you in any way, little girl,” he hisses. It sounds alien in his youthful, almost angelic face. “I’ll just kill you the traditional way. And I’m very inventive. You won’t be disappointed at how painful I’ll make it for you.”

Mallory’s magic rushes through her skin. It flows and burns and it singes Langdon’s hands where they’ve been touching her skin.

He jumps back with a howl. He looks at his blistered palms, then at Mallory, his eyes a raging storm.

“I guess one of us _was_ powerful at this time,” she says, smoothing her dress absentmindedly. “Now that we got that out of the way, it’s time for you to surrender.”

“I will never surrender,” he seethes.

She looks to the sky. “And I will never let you win. So I guess we’re at an impasse.”

“I should have killed you right where I saw you; at your home, without a single word, the way you’ve done it to me.” She imagines she can see the child in him then, slipping through the cracks in his facade. He’s disappointed and frustrated and _lost_, and something about that makes her heart sting once more.

“I can easily overpower you, all on my own,” she tells him. “Imagine what the combined power of the whole coven would do to you.”

Despite that, she doesn’t want to kill him, not again. It’s not worth the nightmares, not even with the knowledge of how necessary it is. Obviously, she can’t let him go free, either. It’s only a matter of time until he finds the Satanists and accepts the sacrifice, allowing his power to grow. He has his memories, so all of that could happen much sooner than it did in their original timeline.

She can’t risk it.

She _shouldn’t_ risk it.

“Do you regret it?” she asks, hoping – for what, she can’t tell.

Langdon bares his teeth. “I regret a lot of things. Talking to you tops the list right now.”

“You know what I mean. All that destruction. The pain. The ugliness. I mean – you said you wanted to make a new, better world.” She looks at him curiously, as if inspecting a lab subject. “But there was nothing left to build on. And the people you’ve left – most of them were just plain terrible. You hated them. There was no way your brave new world would make you satisfied. Or were you planning to kill them all? Were you planning to kill every single one of them until you were all alone amongst the ash and fumes?”

“You got all that from the ten-minute interview we had?” he snorts, although his eyes narrow, calculating.

She shrugs. “That, and what we found out of your work with the Cooperative.”

“You’ve been keeping tabs on me.”

“Do you know what I think?”

Langdon sneers, “I don’t really _care_.”

“I think you never really had a plan,” she presses on. “I think everything that’s happened – it was the Cooperative’s idea, not yours. All you ever wanted was your revenge on Miss Cordelia. When she – when she killed herself – that’s when you truly lost.” She looks at him then, challenging. “You could make different choices now. You don’t have to repeat your mistakes all over again.”

He laughs at her, a sharp, unpleasant sound. “You think you have me all figured out, little girl. You seem to be forgetting who you’re talking to.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Kill you,” he says, hands flexing by his sides. “Kill them. Kill the whole world.”

They step behind one of the houses, shadowed by great oak trees. Langdon crowds her against the wall, coldness seeping from the bricks where they touch her back. His face is devoid of expression. She knows what happens next.

His fingers wrap themselves around her neck and squeeze, hard. She grabs at his jacket, keeping herself upright, and lets him do it to her, for a second, for a few more; her penance for what she’s done. For what she’s about to do.

She feels no relief when he finally lets go of her and falls to the ground, having his air cut off. He chokes and she watches impassively, waiting until he stops moving. His eyes roll back.

He had his chance.

This time, she sets him on fire.

.

“Hello there. Is Mallory home?”

This must be a nightmare.

What can she do to wake up?

Like clockwork, she runs to the door, avoiding Zoe’s questioning gaze. And there he is, none the worse for wear, a smile on his lips that would have been charming if not for the cold glint in his eyes.

“Walk with me,” he tells her, offering her his hand.

They barely make it into the garden before he’s upon her, and she can feel his power this time, the darkness of it, the ugliness, the toxicity. He is fresh after the sacrifice, brimming with his father’s magic. Mallory curls her hands into fists.

“Are we well-matched now?” he asks, wisps of darkness swirling around his fingers.

“Why can’t you stay dead?” Exasperation seeps into her voice as her back hits the bark of a tree. Langdon steps closer, his magic licking her skin.

“You just can’t kill me properly,” he says, “or maybe you don’t want to.”

She’s been meaning to ask Cordelia about the spell they’d used – would use? – on Ms. Meade, the one that trapped her soul in hell, forever. But there was never a feasible explanation for her need of that knowledge and Mallory kept putting it off, until it was too late.

“Are you afraid?” he asks.

Mallory licks her lips. “Yes.”

“Good.”

He grabs her wrists and it burns, oh, how it burns—

“I’m afraid of myself,” she tells him through the pain, leaning into him, “because it’s getting easier, killing you, each time.”

She pushes back with her magic and they fall to the grass, her on top of him, bleeding wounds blooming on her wrists, on her arms, wherever he touched her. The fabric of her dress darkens with blood.

She drags her nails over his throat and opens him up. He laughs. “So I _have_ corrupted you in a way,” he says, before she crushes his larynx and trachea, and burns him to ash.

This time she scatters him on the wind.

.

“Hello there. I came to take Mallory out.”

“On a date? Or with a knife?” she asks sweetly, grabbing her coat and stepping outside the door before anyone says another word.

It keeps happening. They live an endless circle, even as time moves forward. She kills him, he comes back. The story repeats itself, more or less the same. They’re a snake eating its tail, a pentagram with no beginning or end.

Langdon smirks and helps her into her coat. “Can’t it be both?”

It’s starting to get chilly outside and she leans into him, his unnatural warmth coming as an advantage.

“My disciples love me,” he tells her over the howling of the wind. “Do you know how lost they were before I came? I never paid them much mind before, I was too focused on myself, but really, they could be an army in the right hands.”

“What are you going to use them for?”

He smiles. “Oh, terrible things.”

It begins to rain, and the cold wind cuts at her skin. Mallory shivers despite her warm coat. “Don’t you want to– grab a coffee or something before we, uh, get on with it?” she asks, feeling herself tense despite herself, readying for a fight.

“I have a better idea.” He grabs her hand – for once it doesn’t hurt – and they run through the downpour in the direction of a darkened house.

He tears the front door open with a flick of his wrist and ushers her inside. “You can’t do that,” she hisses, as she grabs at his soaked jacket.

“Relax.” He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “No one is coming home tonight. They’re on vacation, see?” He points to the calendar hanging on the fridge, the whole week starred and underlined, “lake house” written in capital letters above it. Mallory swallows her protests. She’ll fix everything for them, maybe even leave some money to compensate the losses, once she’s done with him.

She watches him tentatively as he starts a fire in the fireplace and levitates a bottle of wine from one of the cabinets. Two glasses follow, and he smiles pleasantly. It sets her on edge. “We can wait until the rain stops, can’t we?” he asks, pouring the wine and passing her one of the glasses.

She holds it to her nose suspiciously. “Are you trying to poison me?”

Langdon snorts. “I could be doing so many other things to you, and you would have no idea.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I already tried that once, remember? It didn’t stick.”

His hair is longer now. It curls at his nape, unruly from the humidity. She notices the way it falls into his eyes sometimes, the way he pushes it back angrily. He needs to have it cut again.

“Maybe we should stop trying, then,” she muses, finger trailing over the rim of her glass. She sits down by the fireplace, the flames warming her shivering form.

“But there are still so many ways in which I want to make you suffer,” Langdon says, a smirk curving his lips. There is no intensity to his words though, and Mallory ignores them, taking a sip from her glass. His smirk widens.

“Has Cordelia started fading yet?” he asks, sitting beside Mallory, his knee brushing her folded legs. “Have you started killing her yet?”

Mallory swallows hard, fingers curling into the fabric of her dress. “I don’t know. She hasn’t told me anything of the sort.”

“Well then, hopefully it happens soon.” He salutes her with his glass. “These are the moments that make life worth living.”

They’ve changed the timeline so many times already. She is aware of his dealings with the Church, with the Cooperative. He is more mindful than before, more careful. More calculating. She allows him to come back, time and again, even though she now knows the spell that can bind his soul in hell forever. It would be so simple. So easy.

But he hasn’t hurt any of her own yet.

So she lets him be, for now.

“Venable hates me,” he says, watching as she sips more wine, as it goes down her throat, her slender neck working while she swallows. He licks his lips. “It’s like she can sense the pain in the ass I’m going to be for her in the future. Fascinating.”

“Very.”

“Do you think she’s a witch?”

Mallory laughs. “Not everyone who dislikes you is a witch, Michael.”

“Oh, I know that. My family is a prime example.”

She goes quiet then, the bitterness of the wine making her nauseous all of a sudden.

Michael’s fingers play with the hem of her dress. “Would you like to be in one of my Outposts, when the time comes?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to indulge in your fantasy. You know it’s never going to happen.”

“You keep saying that, yet here I am, moving my work onwards,” he says, lips curling. He leans closer and his eyes darken. “It’s almost like you want it to happen all over again.”

She feels light-headed. “I’m allowing you to choose a different path. But if it ends in apocalypse, then I _will_ cut it short.”

“So much talk,” he purrs, “yet your actions tell a different story.”

Mallory sways, and reaches blindly forward, grabbing a fistful of his shirt to steady herself. He falls back to the carpet, and she follows, shaking hands pressing into his chest. “You did poison me,” she says groggily, half in amazement, trying to keep herself from collapsing into him completely.

Michael laughs, mirth dancing in his eyes. “You knew I would, and still you trusted me,” he wraps his arms around her waist and presses her into him, “it would be cute if it weren’t so damnably _stupid_ of you, Mallory.”

She extends her arm to the side and grabs the empty wine bottle. It’s heavy in her shaking, slippery hand. It feels even heavier when she lifts it up and slams it blindly onto Michael’s head.

Glass breaks, shards of it digging into his beautiful face, his blood splattering her eyelids, her lips, her tongue. She’s still holding the neck of the bottle in her hand. She digs the jagged edge into his chest.

He convulses beneath her, hands digging painfully into her hips. “So crafty,” he croaks out, as she pushes all of her weight into driving the glass deeper, straight to his heart.

Her vision swims. Finally, when she feels him draw his last breath, she lets herself collapse on top of him, drenched in blood, shards of glass digging into her skin. And at last, unconsciousness takes her.

.

“Hello there—”

It’s Mallory who opens the door this time, and his smile is wilder than before when she grabs his hand and drags him away, not allowing him to finish his introduction.

This chilly winter morning his eyes seem bluer than the sky.

They walk across the street without a word, past the white picket fences, past the holly garlands above doors and blinking fairy lights in windows.

There’s another empty house. Another broken door.

Mallory grabs at his face, nails digging into his cheeks as she drags him down to her level. His hands clasp tightly around her waist, and he leans down obediently, crashing his mouth to hers.

There’s blood underneath her nails. Blood in her mouth, too, as she bites at his tongue, at his lips, her fingers clawing at his shirt in mad haste.

She bumps into a table, into the chairs, as he tries to navigate them across the house without disentangling from each other for even a second. Finally, her ass hits the marble counter, and he lifts her up onto it with ease, her legs locking tightly around his waist. He tangles his hands in her hair, pulling at it roughly, dragging her head back to expose her neck for his lips and teeth. She rocks into him, the pent-up frustration and anticipation igniting her inside and out.

Michael reaches between them and tears her tights off her legs. His fingers tuck her panties aside and push inside her, hot and long and too big, making her moan into his mouth. “How are you going to kill me this time, Mallory?” he asks, pumping his fingers in and out of her, his thumb pressing merciless circles into her clit.

“Maybe you’ll be the one who- kills me instead,” she gasps, her fingers digging into his shoulders, hard enough to leave bruises beneath his shirt.

Just as she’s about to come, he pulls his fingers out. He laughs into her mouth as she makes a keening sound, her hips bucking needily into him. “I’ll try my best,” he says, his tongue flicking over her lips.

She slaps him across the face. His lip splits open and an angry pink flush spreads over his left cheek.

Michael bares his bloodied teeth. They blur in her mind, the men she’s killed: the Langdon of the apocalypse, the Michael of the past, and the man standing right here, between her thighs – the man who should be killing her—having her spread in front of him, open and unguarded, begging for his touch—and who, against all odds, doesn’t.

They breathe heavily, staring at each other in ferocious anger, hunger electric in their veins. She’s not aware of anything but his eyes and his hands, and the feeling of his cock straining against his pants, rubbing at the pulsing wetness of her cunt.

His hand reaches out and grips the base of her throat, pushing her back down onto the counter. Her head hits the marble with a deafening thud and her vision darkens at the edges. He squeezes his fingers around her neck, pressing her forcefully down into the cold stone. She claws at his hand, nails digging so hard she must reach the bone, but he doesn’t loosen his hold. Through the ringing in her ears she can barely make out the sound of a belt falling to the floor. Then, the zipper opening.

He enters her and she screams.

She screams and arches off the counter as his hips slam into her violently, his thrusts deep and hard and terrible. He keeps holding her down, his heavy breaths ringing in her ears, the scent of him tainting the little air she manages to draw in. She comes with a sob, her pleasure sudden and blinding, but still he doesn’t slow. He fucks her through her orgasm until she lies boneless and shaking beneath him, until she feels another one starting to build up, pleasure and pain mixing together like poison inside her.

He lets go of her neck. His hand moves up to curl in her hair, cradling her scalp as he leans down to press his lips to hers. Her pleasure rises again, white-hot, and she grips his shoulders for purchase, heels digging into his ass.

He bites at her neck and she comes, clenching around him excruciatingly, triggering his own release. He curses, emptying himself inside her. Her legs clench around his waist.

Michael leans above her, struggling to catch his breath. The picture of ruin she must make – lacy black dress hiked up over her hips, angry purple bruises encircling her neck. She feels dried blood in her mouth. The terrible pain in her throat. Michael’s come dripping down the inside of her thighs.

He brushes her hair away from her face, so gently it doesn’t feel like him at all. “Mallory,” he whispers against her skin, “are you dead?”

She finds that she can’t speak.

There’s an assortment of knives within her reach. She could hold out her hand, wrap her fingers around one of them. It would be over so quickly.

She can wait a little while longer.

.

“Hello there,” she says, walking into his office with snowflakes melting in her hair. He raises his head and his eyes light up at the sight of her. It stirs something inside her, something she pushes forcefully back and locks away.

“Have I missed our date?” he asks, leaning back in his chair. “I believe it’s still a month away.”

Mallory sits across from him, feeling safer for the desk that separates them. “You’re right,” she says. “But I’ve heard some very troubling rumors recently.”

He hums. “Like what?”

“Like that you’re selling places of safety in the case of an end of the world.”

Michael’s lips curve in a slow smile. “It’s just a precaution, of course,” he says without blinking.

“I’ve made a promise,” she says. The words come out cold and stiff, sound strange in her mouth. She finds that she has trouble breathing. “A promise I intend to keep.”

He stands up from his chair. In his long coat and red gloves he looks terrifying, a monster from a nightmare. He scares her, but for a different reason entirely.

Mallory’s breath catches as he walks up to her. His leather-clad hand cups her cheek tenderly, then moves up to comb through her hair. “My Mallory,” he says, “you could have kept your promise many times already. Yet you never did. What makes you think this time will be any different?”

“Because you’ve crossed the line.”

“Have I now?” He kneels at her side then, their eyes level with each other. One of his hands rests on her knee, the other traces the edge of her jaw. Remembrance makes her head swim. “I have a place for you. With me. Nothing and no one will ever hurt you.” He smiles, “except for me, of course.”

“I gave you a choice,” she whispers, her eyes stinging.

The leather of his glove feels cold against her skin. “I’m offering you a chance to live,” he says.

She’s scared. So terribly scared.

He presses his lips to hers, softly, with care. She lets him kiss her, lets him pretend to be someone human, someone real, someone who could love her.

“What are you going to do now?” he asks, eyes brighter than the sun and bluer than the skies.

The binding spell feels heavy on her tongue.

She closes her eyes.


End file.
